Philosophy and Psychopathology

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XII

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2. Introduction

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Why Philosophy?

      • Manfred Spitzer

      Pages 3-18

3. Experience and Its Disturbances

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

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   2. Toward a Husserlian Phenomenology of the Initial Stages of Schizophrenia

      • Osborne P. Wiggins, Michael A. Schwartz, Georg Northoff

      Pages 21-34

   3. Concepts of Intentionality and Their Application to the Psychopathology of Schizophrenia—A Critique of the Vulnerability Model

      • Christoph Mundt

      Pages 35-43

   4. Kant on Schizophrenia

      • Manfred Spitzer

      Pages 44-58

   5. Are Psychotic Illnesses Category Disorders? Proposal for a New Understanding and Classification of the Major Forms of Mental Illness

      • Edward M. Hundert

      Pages 59-70

4. Rationality and Self

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 71-71

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   2. The Irrelevance of Rationality to Adaptive Behavior

      • Brendan A. Maher

      Pages 73-85

   3. Limits of Irrationality

      • Frank Döring

      Pages 86-101

   4. Technical Problems with Teleological Explanation in Psychopathology: Sigmund Freud as a Case in Point

      • Joseph F. Rychlak

      Pages 102-117

   5. Self-Consciousness, I-Structures, and Physiology

      • Hector-Neri Castañeda

      Pages 118-145

   6. When the Self Becomes Alien to Itself: Psychopathology and the Self Recursive Loop

      • Alfred Margulies

      Pages 146-155

5. Perception, Thought and Schizophrenia

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 157-157

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   2. Verbal Hallucinations and Pre-Conscious Mentality

      • Julian Jaynes

      Pages 159-170

   3. Schizophrenia and the Quantification of Semantic Phenomena: How can Something Mean Something?

      • Hinderk M. Emrich

      Pages 171-177

   4. Why Thinking is Easy

      • Steven Matthysse

      Pages 178-186

   5. On the Development of Categories

      • Peter Klein

      Pages 187-199

   6. Normality and Mental Illness—Dimensions Versus Categories: Theoretical Considerations and Experimental Findings

      • Godehard Oepen, Anne Harrington, Matthias Fünfgeld

      Pages 200-210

Philosophy and psychopathology have more in common than philosophers, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists might think. Three fields of inquiry come to mind: (1) Questions about the scientific status of psychopatho­ logical statements and claims, (2) ethical questions, and (3) problems regarding the question of how to account for something like a disordered mind. While the first two domains have frequently been addressed in articles and debates (think of the mind-body problem and the problem of institutionalization versus self-determination as examples of issues in the two fields), the question of how the mind should be conceived in order for psychopathology to work best has seldom been discussed. The present volume focuses on this question. Perception, thought, affect, will, and the like are terms which made their way from philosophy into psychology, and into present psychiatry, where disturbances of these "faculties" or "functions" are believed to form the most basic part of symptomatology. While these terms and many others that are used to refer to symptoms of mental disorder (such as "self', "consciousness", "drive", and "identity") may seem to be purely descriptive and theoretically "innocent", they are packed with implicit assumptions, theoretical concepts, and sometimes dogmatic postulates.

• philosophy
• physiology
• psychology
• psychopathology
• schizophrenia
• thinking

• Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

  Manfred Spitzer, Brendan A. Maher

Policies and ethics